Thursday, July 26, 2007
The Engineered Virus
J.J. Abram's next big thing is being advertised initially as a viral marketing experiment: his first theatre trailer doesn't give away much, if anything of the movie, save for its basic premise. It leaves a lot to the imagination, a rarity in today's entertainment world, where regularly surpise and twists are given away in order to encourage audiences to repatriate the ever more sparsely populated theater. Abram's doesn't even give away the name of the film, a bold move that really did set the blogosphere abuzz. The bug was caught and caught good.However, that didn't mean the studio wanted to let it out of quarantine. Those that were piqued wanted to share the experience with others, so invariably the trailer ended up on YouTube - for a grand total of about a day, before Paramount started to threaten legal action to have them taken down.
I really can't understand the myopia, nay, the glaucoma, that the entertainment industry. They should be giddy with the prospect that people actually care enough about a film they know nothing about to promote it themselves, to everyone with an iinternet connection. They can't sell the durn trailer in and of itself - to me, it's a no-brainer to let people run with with it as far they can. Look what it did for Snakes on a Plane. Imagine what that could do for an actually good film, like the Blair Witch Project.
The only way to get them in the seats is to make them part of the experience, not sue them back out of it.
Labels: Anti-Fun, Got a Permit for Breathing, Hooray for Hollywood
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